We are those people. Injured? Sick? We head straight to google. Need an x-ray? Nah. We are more self-diagnoses kind of people…at least until things get really bad.
That brings us to a few weeks ago. If you are not in close contact with middle schoolers, you may not know this but, they have a very limited attention span. So here’s the scene. We have been learning basketball in P.E. class, so we were warming up with a game of knockout, and I decided to play. I will not bore you with the details of the game if you are unfamiliar, but I will suffice it to say that the sweet, sweet, angel of a student in front of me got distracted while waiting to receive the ball, saw the ball coming at the last second…and…ducked. There I am with about .5 seconds to respond and I tried to get my hands out to catch the ball but Just. Didn’t. Make it. Poor, poor little {wedding} ring finger never saw it coming. I promptly removed my ring so as to not have to cut it off later, and continued to play until I won, because duh.
Seen here heroically finishing a blog post.
Four days after the tragic finger incident, there was the nose incident. It was Monday afternoon and we had just gotten home from school and were frantically getting ready for dinner plans with some friends. I needed to shower so I laid out clothes for Judah and Isaac started getting him dressed. Just as I got out of the shower, Isaac came in to the bedroom holding Judah by the hand and says, probably more sternly than I have ever heard him speak, “You need to discipline Judah.”, to which I responded “Um…in general orrrr did something happen?”. Somebodyyy may accuse me of occasionally being a softy, so I didn’t know if I was just getting a general verbal spanking. Apparently while he had been holding Judah in his lap to put his shirt on, Judah had not-so-thoughtfully thrown his head backwards, directly into daddy’s nose. My initial response? Let’s not talk about that. I took Judah by the hand, and disciplined as sternly as I could through tears from laughing at the absurdity of our lives.
In lieu of going directly to the doctor we:
- Googled.
- Called nurse friends.
- Looked at old pictures to see “if his nose had always been that crooked”.
- Called our super speedy local family doctor and asked “ya, I know you don’t have an X-ray machine, but dontcha think if we stopped by you could tell if it was broken just by looking?” (After all, the doctors office was on our way to our dinner plans.)
We called our friends to let them know that we would still be there, just maybe a little late pending the decision to go to the hospital…Isaac made the official call, after reading that rarely is there permanent damage done by not seeking immediate medical attention, so we skipped the doctor and proceed directly to our fried chicken dinner with friends. #priorities (FYI, fried chicken is hugely popular in Korea).
Isaac eating chicken (if you look closely, his nose is crooked)
UPDATE: We still don’t know if either were officially broken, because you have to go to the doctor to know that. Isaac’s nose is fine, it was bruised for a few days and it is just recently not tender to the touch. I can’t bend my finger fully and it still hurts, and most regrettably I can’t wear my lovely wedding ring. But hey, things could be worse, we could be stranded in an airport with two kids and 40,000 Koreans…
Until next time…
Our Southern Seoul 